Bradford Washburn, Jr.

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Bradford Washburn, Jr., American mountaineer, photographer, cartographer, and museum director (born June 7, 1910, Cambridge, Mass.—died Jan. 10, 2007, Lexington, Mass.), mapped the Grand Canyon during the 1970s and made Boston’s Museum of Science a leading institution of its type. A pioneer of aerial photography, Washburn produced transcendent photographs of mountains, and he also used photography in creating a wealth of maps of mountains. He concentrated particularly on the mountains of the Yukon region of North America, producing one of his best-known maps, of Mt. McKinley, in 1960. In 1939 Washburn became director of the New England Museum of Natural History, which under his tutelage expanded and diversified, becoming in 1948 the Boston Museum of Science and later the Museum of Science; he remained at the helm until 1980. To map the Grand Canyon, he used lasers and reflecting prisms as well as photographs, and in the 1980s he used photography to produce a topographical map of Mt. Everest. Washburn was a member of the 1992 survey team that made the first laser measurement on top of Mt. Everest.